As the Religious Right’s boycott of the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) builds momentum, Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily has called for exclusion of the ACU from the “conservative movement” as a result of their connections with GOProud, a conservative gay-rights group that is a sponsor of CPAC. Organizations including the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Concerned Women For America, Liberty Counsel, Liberty University, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Family Research Council have decided to boycott CPAC over GOProud’s participation. GOProud wants to shrink the clout of the Religious Right in the Republican Party and referred to such groups “dinosaurs headed to political extinction.”
Farah, who previously compared GOProud to the Ku Klux Klan, joins other right wing activists in believing that GOProud is an assault on the wider conservative movement. He likens the Religious Right’s opposition to GOProud to the Biblical story of Gideon: When Giden raised up an army to free the Israelites from the Midianites and end idol-worshipping, God ultimately ordered Gideon to reduce his army from thirty-two thousand to just three hundred or otherwise “Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me’” (Judges 7:2). Farah writes that conservatives, like Gideon, should “purge” their ranks of those who embrace “enemies of moral values” like GOProud:
If the U.S. “conservative movement” is to survive, prosper and be a force for reclaiming everything that made America unique and great in the days ahead, it is going to need a purge.
“Purge” is not a bad word. It simply means, according to the dictionary definition, “to rid of whatever is impure or undesirable; cleanse; purify.”
Conservatives need to purge from their movement anything that is not conservative.
They shouldn’t be attempting to broaden the definition of “conservative.” They shouldn’t be trying to build a bigger tent in the failed model of the Republican Party. They shouldn’t be revising or lowering their standards. And they absolutely shouldn’t be embracing enemies of the moral values that have defined the movement from the beginning.
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That’s why it’s time for true conservatives to get their act together as America faces its greatest challenges ever in the next two years.
God cut Gideon’s army up, slicing and dicing it until it represented only a tiny fraction of its numbers. God didn’t want a big army to win victory. He wanted a miracle performed by a tiny army listening carefully and being in obedience to His commands.
God purged thousands from Gideon’s army.
Conservatives need God’s help, not GOProud’s.
Purges can make an organization or a movement stronger.
Purges can help to refine, rather than redefine, what an ideology is all about.
Purges can sharpen and strengthen a movement – bringing it back to the core convictions and principles that made it successful.
And that’s why the purge of the conservative movement should begin with David Keene and his administrative team at ACU.
